Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Fictive character spills on author: try it, it's a helpful exercise.

When you write stories you get to create characters, but what would one of your characters have to say about you? Here's Ruthie, circa a few years back, on Jeannette:

Hi, my name is Ruthie and I got picked to be the character that tells you about Jeannette. Amazing, she picked me.

I wonder what she thinks I’ll tell? Not that I don’t like to talk, ask any of my friends, they’ll tell you, but I’m a good listener too. I like people. People are always welcome at my door. They come, I feed them, we talk. I could have been a psychiatrist or a hairdresser maybe that would have been just as good, but me, I stayed home on the ranch. But I’m getting off the subject; this is supposed to be about Jeannette.

It’s a shame she doesn’t have a better memory, and she could be just a bit more industrious. All right, so she already has the stress from her job. I know what that’s like because my son, he’s a very important person, he has the professional stress. Anyway, so it takes it’s toll, but a persons just got to decide, what are you going do? So if she wants some advice from me I’ll give it to her with strudel and tea, “If you wantto tell a story you got to get to it.” But maybe she’ll listen to you people better. Who knows what difference you make in a person’s life? In one ear and out the other they say,but with her I think some of it sticks.

But as I was saying about her memory, just the folks she met at my table, oh the history it all spans, she should remember it all. Okay, I’m not really someone she knew…and yet I didn’t spring from thin air either. I suspect some of the stories she could tell just the way she heard them, but she’s got these notions about fiction being able to tell a truth in a special way and fiction needs characters and I don’t know about you but personally I’d rather have character than be one. But a character I am and what she’s going to ask ofme next I don’t know.

I know that I’m putting some pressure on her. Sometimes I'd feel like the ladies that inspired me were my Siamese twins, like we were joined back-to-back and trying to walk opposite directions. But I’m learning to just speak up and let her know, “That’s not what I’d say, I’m not as nice as those old friends of yours that you hold so fondly in your heart. I’dstand up to that challenge.” And sure enough, she lets me go.

So while I got the chance, what was it you wanted to know about her? I never could understand her love affair with writing. Talking it out is what I love to do, but she sees something and down it goes into words on a page. One day she found a notebook that was the perfect size for the inner pocket of her purse and she bought five of them. No bells on her toes, she just has paper and pen wherever she goes. I think she actually does her best work in dark black pen on paper, but as you know, she’s using a computer. You got to watch her if she’s doing rewrites, a couple times she’s squeezedthe juice right out of me. Oh, here she comes now, I gotta go.

**********

Ruthie, what have you cooked up now? She’s stirring so many stories she gets them mixed up sometimes so you needn't quite believeeverything she tells you, besides, she almost always exaggerates about me. Jeannette

I love this! A few months ago I had an experience where a character in a middle grade fiction novel I am writing was trying to tell me something. It turned out what she was telling me was to get OUT, that there was too much of me directly in the story and I needed to leave it to the characters to sort out. It reminds me a bit of this. I love when our characters speak to us and even more when we're surprised at what they say. I also love the little notebooks you bought - five of them. Yes!

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